Confession: I didn’t do a lot of research on Seattle before we decided to move here.  I knew it rained a lot.  I knew there was a lot of coffee.  I was aware that I would probably have an excuse to buy more jackets than I did in SoCal.

But snow?  I had no idea it snowed.  We had been here a week before somebody made an offhand comment about how little it snows here, to which I responded, eyes agog, “Wait a minute- it snows in Seattle?”  This person probably thought I was an idiot.

So once I started making friends and I mentioned my snow-phobia, everybody assured me that snow in Seattle is a total anomoly, practically a myth.  They said there were about two weeks a year that the roads would ice up a bit, people would get in a ton of car accidents, and then it would be over.  Seeing acutal white stuff on the ground, they told me, NEVER happens.

Then I looked out the window last night:

I was wary.  Especially considering that I had signed up for the Jingle Bell Run on Sunday.  Running in the SNOW?  People don’t do that.  I got nervous.  But then I remembered how everybody says that snow always melts during the night, so I’d be fine.

Then I looked out the window this morning:

Hmmm…  not exactly melted.  I didn’t want to be a total flake though, so I bundled up in as many layers as I could manage (including 2 of mike’s mismatched knee-high snowboarding socks.  I couldn’t find a matching pair for the life of me) and headed over to my friend Barrie’s house, where her very awesome and very brave boyfriend was there to drive us downtown.

I always hear people complain about Seattlites not knowing how to deal with snow.  Well, Barrie and Dominic are evidently the McGyvers of snow- here they are scraping Dominic’s car windows.  We didn’t have an ice scraper, so they used sticks:

We made it to the madhouse that was the race.  As should be expected, there was a bizarre error on my number identifying me as “Angie Bach,” a 22 year old who lives in Federal Way.  I was too overwhelmed by the sheer number of people to try and argue.

How many people were there?  Well, here is a picture I snapped as our heat started:

So yeah, there were a lot of people.

The race was good.  Considering that I’d been having visions of falling into a snow drift and having my corpse shoveled out days later, I was pretty happy that I ran it in 32 minutes (the thing was definitely too crowded to do much passing.)  Theoretically, I would like to subtract some time for when I slipped in an ice patch, scraped my knee and tore open my running pants right at the knee- now they have a cute “grunge” look to them.  Very Seattle.

I still finished the race, where I met Barrie, who had already finished and managed to ravage any freebies within a 3-mile radius.  I think she ended up walking away with 2 lbs of bananas:

We look cute, huh?

After the race we grabbed breakfast, where I saw the reason why print journalism is failing- this headline:

It’s going to be a fun winter.